We are looking for Java coders to join our low poly multiplayer voxel game project.

We're influenced by games such as Ultima 7, Nethack, Minecraft, Planescape: Torment, and System Shock 1, but we're pretty much going to be more awesome than all of them put together.

The project is currently running on a hobby basis. This is a volunteer position, not a job offer. We don't have any money to pay you. Most of us are working on this on our spare time at the moment. So if you're looking to make some money, please ignore and move on.

The game

"Rituals of the old is an upcoming PC title from an independent Finnish game studio Star and Serpent for Linux, Mac and Windows. Rituals of the old is a multiplayer sandbox RPG voxel game of crafting, building, survival and adventure in an open random generated world."

We're using JavaMonkeyEngine as a base. It provides us with a solid foundation for basic things like animations and model importing, etc. so we don't have to reinvent the wheel when we can avoid it.

We have plans of open sourcing non-game related things (like the voxel engine, etc) under MIT license for the benefit of other game devs once we have something solid.

So why would you want to do this instead of your own projects?

It's a very common and valid question and deserves a straight up answer.

Game development alone is hard. Most people dream about it, dabble in it for a bit, become disillusioned (it's really difficult), and fail to produce anything tangible for their efforts.

We have a serious project going on that was in pre-planning and testing as a mod on another game platform for 4 years. We have been in active development now for over 2 years.

As a part of our team you would be one step closer to realizing your game development dreams. With us you will gain insights into game development and into working in a small/medium sized group (11 people currently, international team). You will gain experience and practical skills about the inner workings and challenges of voxel engines, multiplayer networking, world generation, networked physics - and many other aspects of game development - in a supportive group environment.

What do we need from you

- You are an easy going person who gets along with other people.
- You have to know your way around Java well enough to be able to come up with your own solutions independently.
- You need to be able and willing to learn new necessary skills as we go.
- We will guide you the best we can, but ultimately you should be able to carry yourself and do solid independent work in order to be of any real use to the group. Java students with no prior game development experience will most likely be way over their heads.

In very practical terms we need another pair of hands to do things like:

The small print

For full disclosure: this is currently a hobby/passion project, but we reserve the right to go commercial in the future - provided that everything goes well and it seems like a good idea. In the event of commercial success everyone in the active dev team would be offered an equal opportunity of being employed full/part time by the project on a mediocre salary (depending on the financial situation) for the continued development of the game.

Do NOT apply for this position for the sole purpose of future financial gain. You would most likely make more money gathering bottles and begging as your day job.

In the ideal situation we would be able to support ourselves with game development, but our main goal here is not raking in money - it's to make a great game that we ourselves want to play.

This section is here to cover our ass in case we do decide to go commercial so no one can say "I'm surprised, you never told me about this when I applied". Right now it's not possible to even consider going commercial before we have a viable game. That's still years in the future. But we do reserve the right to go that way - if it seems like a good idea.

To Apply

Go ahead and contact us. We're really easy to talk to.

Email your questions, applications, and portfolios to info@starandserpent.com and let us know a little bit about yourself.